1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an Integrated Circuit (IC) card connector having a braking piece for braking the election of the IC card ejected by an ejection mechanism.
2. Description of the Related Art
An IC card connector is provided in a portion for accommodating a vertically oriented IC card with an ejection mechanism for loading/unloading the IC card, for example, as disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 3,306,395 (Publication No. JP 2001-143816) and U.S. Pat. No. 6,699,061.
Another ejection mechanism provided in the IC card connector has been put into practice as disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 3,429,267 (Publication JP 2001-357931) and U.S. Pat. No. 6,729,892. That is, instead of an ejector member as described in the above-mentioned U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,306,395 and 6,699,061, an IC card is pushed against a biasing force of a coil spring in the loading/unloading direction and held in the accommodation portion by its ejector member. On the other hand, if the loaded IC card is further pushed in the same direction, the ejector member is moved in the card-ejecting direction due to the recovery force of the coil spring to eject the IC card from the accommodation portion.
Such an ejection mechanism comprises, for example as main components, an ejector member, an ejector member control section for controlling the operation for selectively holding or releasing the ejector member, and a coil spring disposed between a side wall defining a card accommodation portion and the ejector member, for biasing the ejector member in the ejecting direction of the IC card.
In this structure, when the IC card is ejected by the ejection mechanism, the ejection speed of the IC card is provided in accordance with an elastic force (a spring constant) of the coil spring.
Accordingly, when the operator removes the IC card from the accommodation portion, there is a risk in that directly after the operator has pushed the IC card twice in the same direction, if his finger is quickly released from an end of the IC card, the IC card may abruptly jump out from the card accommodation portion due to the elastic force of the coil spring.
To avoid such undesirable jumping-out of the IC card, for example as disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 3,306,395, there is a proposal in that a front end of an elastically deformable braking piece is brought into contact with a lower surface of the IC card to generate a frictional force for preventing the IC card from jumping out.